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So there's about a woman who submitted her manuscript to agents under a man's name and got much better responses than she did submitting it as a woman.Ìý

ÌýI don't know how much of the story is true, but I'm pretty sure that this part isn't: after she supposedly sent out six queries under her male pseuonym--on a Saturday, yet--this "happened":ÌýI sent the six queries I had planned to send that day. Within 24 hours George had five responses���three manuscript requests and two warm rejections praising his exciting project.Ìý

This is the part that marks this story as fiction. ÌýI mean, yes. It's not unheard of to get a response within 24 hours. Usually a rejection. It's just rare. (I checked my list for the crime novel everybody hated even though my name is unmistakably male: I heard back from 3 agents out of 33 I queried within a day. I did not receive correspondence from any agents on the weekend.)

My experience querying agents under a male name suggests about 10% of agents respond to queries within a day and 0% respond on the weekends. But of course my sample size, though five times bigger than that of the original article, is probably still too small to draw big conclusions. If you, unlike me, understand statistics and want to take a stab at explaining this, please comment!

So: while technically not impossible, this story is incredibly improbable. It reads to me like there was probably a nugget of truth in there that got embellished. Because getting a better response under the male name is a good story. Getting a shockingly better response--on a weekend!--is a fantastic story.

(In the unlikely event that this did happen, it shows that she got lucky enough to contact a bunch of agents in that small group who typically respond within a day on the same day. Which really shows that we need a larger sample size if we're gonna draw any kind of conclusions at all.)

So: it's a good story, and it reveals something I, and a lot of other people, believe to be true: you'll get a better response for your "literary" novel if your name suggests that you're male.Ìý

So why is it bugging me so much that people are repeating this completely uncritically? I guess I feel like if you're presenting something as factually true (as opposed to the kind of emotional truth you can get in a novel while using made-up events), it should actually be true. If you're going to draw conclusions about the way something in the real world works, you should get actual data and not somebody's too-good-to-be-true unsubstantiated anecdote.

ÌýMost of us are pretty good at being skeptical of claims we inherently don't want to believe. But that's not how con artists work; they sell you something you don't need, or something that doesn't exist, because they tell you something you really want to believe.

That's why I think it's especially important to be skeptical of stories that confirm your opinions; it's how you avoid being taken. This is true on a personal level (wow! I can get an amazing body with very little effort if I just buy this device!) and on a public policy level: (Wow! All you had to do was get rid of those pesky teachers' unions and those amazing educational entrepreneurs who run charter schools were able to get great results!).

Now, I don't think the author of this piece is selling anything particularly harmful; she's done a good job of creating some name recognition that may help her when her novel comes out. ÌýIn a sense, I don't blame her. The frustration she talks about in her piece, the humiliation that comes with unending rejection of your creative work: yeah, I've been there. Maybe she wrote this embellished story to sell something to herself: the idea that there's an explanation for her difficulty, that the world (and the publishing world in particular) fundamentally makes sense.

The internet has given everyone a platform and a voice, and this is a good thing. But I'd like to suggest that this requires that we all ramp up our skepticism of everything we read (this is doubly true of anything that comes out of the listing ship that is Gawker media right now). Especially when it's something we'd really like to be true.

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